


A Dozen Red Roses

by FireOpal (Sandel)



Series: A Triptych of Possible Beginnings [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Community: HPFT, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Grief/Mourning, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-30
Updated: 2016-06-30
Packaged: 2018-07-19 07:32:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7351789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sandel/pseuds/FireOpal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p></p><div class="center">
  <p>After the death of his wife Audrey, Percy finds solace, and the possibility of something new, with his friend Oliver.</p>
  <p>---</p>
  <p>Written for Scooterbug8515 <span class="u">The Devil is in the Details Challenge</span> (where it got 1:st place... by virtue of being the only entry : P) <i>and</i> Rumpelstiltskin's <span class="u">Companion Piece Challenge</span> over at hpfanfictalk.com, <i>and</i> for Sam's (Dojh167's) birthday! <3</p>
</div>
            </blockquote>





	A Dozen Red Roses

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dojh167](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dojh167/gifts).



>   
>   
> Banner by TreacleTart at The Dark Arts forums.  
> \---  
> And one last Bappy Hirthday to my favourite Sam!
> 
> This story grew wildly out of control for what was just meant to be a third story thrown in to make the set comply with the rules for Rumpel’s challenge, ooops. It even ended up as the longest of the three! I hope you’ll like it!
> 
> <3 <3 <3
> 
> /Kapa 
> 
> Oh, and this was quick beta’d by Hayden (Magenta_Robes), so thanks a bunch for that! <3

Percy carefully runs his thumb over the rose’s petals. It like flipping through the pages of a book, or like caressing his wife’s wrinkly hand. Or rather, like a poor man’s substitute of the latter. He lifts the flower to his face to drink in its sweet smell of promises and hopes one last time. Then he bends down on one knee to place it next to the eight roses already lying there. For nine days now he’s been coming to the Highgate Cemetery, in sunshine and rain, to leave a red rose on his wife’s grave, and he’ll come for three more. Twelve red roses for his dead beloved Audrey, just like he gave her a rose a day for twelve days before he proposed to her.

On his knees by Audrey’s grave, the gravel cutting into his skin through his Muggle trousers, Percy can’t help remembering those two weeks so many years ago. The first day Audrey was just happy to get a pretty flower, taking out her most beautiful vase to put it in. On the second, she laughed and stuck the other rose down into the same vase as the first. On the third day, she needed a bigger vase, and on the sixth, Percy could tell that she had started to suspect he was building up to something. On the ninth she asked if he’d just keep giving her a flower a day forever, and on the twelfth… Percy stops the memory short. It’d be too painful to remember more, to remember Audrey’s overjoyed smile as she said ‘yes’ and threw his arms around him and kissed him over and over, her face so close to him that he could see the crow’s feet at the corner of her eyes that were then only starting to form, that he loved to see deepen over the years for every smile they shared together…

_This is what you get for marrying a Muggle._

The thought comes unbidden into Percy’s mind, and in all their horribleness, Percy can’t help snorting at it. His sense of humour, which so many people have thought non-existent, has always been of the gallows variety. And after all, the words are true; Percy has always known that Audrey was likely to die long before him, barring any illnesses or accidents on his side. Muggles rarely push past the one hundred year line. Audrey lived to eighty-seven.

“ _Salva_ ,” Percy whispers, putting the same preserving spell on the rose he just put on the grave, just as he has done on all the others.

It might be in breach of the Statue of Secrecy to do so at a Muggle cemetery, but Percy is far beyond caring. He doubts any Muggle will guess at the existence of a secret magical community just from some exceptionally long-lived flowers anyway.

Percy’s back is starting to ache, so he starts to rise, patting the gravel smooth where he’d been resting his knees. When he's halfway upright his spine gives a nasty-sounding _crack_ , and he has to grab the headstone for support. The polished granite is smooth beneath his fingers, and as he stretches out his aching back he reads the words engraved in it.

_Audrey Weasley, 1971 – 2068._

There’s no quote on the grave; a meagre collection of words could never encompass all that Audrey had been, so Percy hadn’t even tried to find any. Hermione had written the obituary for the Prophet and Audrey’s sister the one for the Muggle paper, and they had both been beautiful. Percy hated them. And suddenly he can’t even stand to see her _name_. He turns away from the grave, lifts his eyes to the darkening sky. It’s deep grey, like Audrey’s eyes. There’s no respite.

Percy rubs at his eyes, and feels that whitish powder of dried-up tears collect on his fingers. He can’t stand the thought of being alone tonight. He could go to Molly’s house, and let his oldest daughter worry and fuzz over him as he looks at her and only see’s her mother in every line of her face. Or he could go to Lucy’s flat, and put a mournful damper on the shenanigans of her and Kahina’s large brood by sitting stone faced in their large blue sofa. Neither sounds especially appealing. Maybe it’s not family Percy needs tonight. Instead he decides to visit his oldest friend.

After making sure that no Muggles are in view, he turns on his heel – catching a glimpse of the grave and the nine roses again as he does – and with a _crack_ quite like the one his back made a minute ago, he’s gone.

* * *

Oliver opens the door on Percy’s third knock.

“Perce!” he exclaims, his round face lighting up.

His _tired_ face. Like Percy he has that white powdery stuff in the corners of his eyes, but his is most likely not from crying…

“Sorry, were you sleeping?” Percy says, feeling what has to be a sheepish grin stretch across his face.

“Yeah. But don’t worry about it,” Oliver replies, smiling back. “Come in.”

Percy keeps smiling as he follows Oliver into his little cottage. Sheepish or not, it’s his first real smile since Audrey died, and he cherishes it. Then there’s a flash of red in the corner of his eye, and Percy turns towards the hallway mirror. A late middle aged man stares back at him, smiling widely, but as Percy watches him the smile dies on his lips. _That can’t be me_ , he thinks. How can he feel so old, and look so _young_? Audrey’s in the ground, and Percy’s hair still has red in it. Audrey’s in the ground, and the lines on Percy’s face hardly deserve the name of ‘wrinkles.’ Only the bloodshot eyes and the bluish bags beneath them look about right.

“Perce?”

By now, Oliver has noticed that Percy isn’t right behind him anymore, and he turns to look at his friend, sees how his blue eyes boring into the mirror. Three steps back, and he’s at Percy’s side, putting his arm around him. Percy has gotten a thousand stiff I’m-so-sorry-for-your-loss hugs the last few weeks, but this is different. He leans into the touch, and realises how starved he is for this kind of easy intimacy.

“Right pair of old dodderers you are!” the mirror yells after them as Oliver leads Percy to the sofa in the living room.

The sofa is still warm, with a blanket draped haphazardly over one of the arm rest (as if kicked off by someone getting up to see what sort of madman is banging on his front door), and a fire crackles happily in the fireplace. On the coffee table lies the copy of the recent biography of Gellert Grindelwald that Percy got Oliver for his birthday, with Oliver’s reading glasses resting on top of it.

Oliver doesn’t sit down next to Percy in the sofa, but draws up an armchair instead. Then he sits down and leans his elbows on the table, looking Percy straight in the eye. Oliver’s eyes are grey, like Audrey’s were, but lighter, bluer.

“How are things?” Oliver asks, compassion warm as a cup of hot chocolate in his voice.

Percy shrugs.

“Like you would expect, I guess…”

“Are you getting any sleep?”

“Nah.”

“Are you eating enough?”

“Sure.”

“How do you spend your days?”

“I go to the grave every day, leave a flower…” The words don’t even come close to capturing what this daily ritual means to Percy, but he hardly cares. “Other than that, I try to read, but… well. Oh, and people come by to keep me company, like you did last Thursday.”

“And not a single sensible word was I able to get out of you then.”

Is that true? Maybe. Perhaps things are slowly getting better after all, then.

“How are things with _you_?” Percy replies, giving himself further proof that he’s getting better by remembering to ask back.

Oliver’s mouth twitches oddly.

“Frederick sent me an owl from the Maldives,” he says. “He’s vacationing there with his ‘ _darling Petruccio_ ’…”

Percy winces.

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” Oliver sighs. “But I think your wife dying trumps me being a little bummed about one of my exes.”

Percy suddenly doesn’t want to talk any more about his dead wife, so instead he says something that turns out to be _momentous_. It doesn’t feel like that when he says it, though, it just feels very natural here in Oliver’s familiar old living room, with Percy present not just in the flesh, but in the books on tables and in shelves, the art on the walls and that mug on the mantelpiece (probably filled with cold, forgotten tea) that Percy bought for his first flat and Oliver used to drink from whenever he visited, until Percy just told him to keep it. And so, the question slips out spontaneously, unthinkingly…

“Why didn’t the two of us ever, you know… date?”

Oliver freezes, halfway through a movement to lean back in his chair, his arms in the air, a dead ringer for someone hit by an _Immobulus_ charm. Percy had no idea his simple question would get such a reaction out of his friend, and when Oliver starts to move again they both know that it’s too late to just try and brush this off.

Oliver sinks back in his chair with a deep sigh. Percy mirrors his motion, leaning against the back of the sofa, and for a moment they just sit like that, looking at each other. Then Oliver suddenly rises.

“I’ll make us some tea,” he says, disappearing out into the hallway again.

* * *

Percy listens to the sounds of Oliver puttering around in the kitchen, and his thoughts drifts to the shoebox that stands on the second lowest shelf in the left wardrobe in his bedroom at home. That’s where he keeps all the newspaper clippings that have ever been written about him. Audrey always called him ‘obsessive’ for his collection, and often urged him to throw it out, but Percy had made a promise to never lie to himself again, and he needed the reminders. Not that he’d be likely to ever forget what Rita Skeeter wrote about him in the Daily Prophet on the 28th of July, 2002…

It’s the only clipping Percy still regularly takes out of the box, and even now he can easily see it in his mind’s eye; paper yellowed with age, and a grainy, black and white picture showing Percy and some Muggle man whose name he can’t even remember anymore – with a pang of renewed grief Percy realises that he might well be dead now, being a Muggle and all – caught in an eternal loop of laughing, looking around, and then kissing. It had been taken outside a Muggle nightclub where Percy had gone to forget himself, and it made sure he never could.

He could just as easily have been caught kissing a Muggle woman – maybe he even had been, and the paparazzi had just waited for something even saucier – but as it was, Skeeter’s article must have practically written itself (and not just because she used that Quick-Quotes Quill). “Percy Weasley Spotted Secretly Fondling Muggle Man,” the headline read, and in the article Rita wrote about how it’s “ _sad to see that even after the reveal – by yours truly – that the late and great (for some values of ‘great’) Albus Dumbledore himself was a homophile, our young wizards of that very same persuasion still feel themselves forced to seek their forbidden love in the arms not of their magical kin, but of Muggles_.”

And it didn’t matter than Percy had never actually hidden his sexuality, that he’d chosen the man because he was a Muggle rather than because of his sex, that the real ‘scandal’ was that he was running from his past headfirst into the Muggle world… No, Rita had found a new angle to attack him from (second only to her ever favourite ‘better late than never’ quips), and she would milk it for all its wort. She had kept writing about ‘poor closeted Percy Weasley’ (even though he wasn’t even closeted because _she’d outed him_ ) until she died - according to her Audrey had been nothing but Percy’s beard. The concept of bisexuality seemed to be utterly incomprehensible to her.

But what Percy’s really looking for in his imagined rummage through the shoebox isn’t the article, but the letter fastened to it with one of those clever little Muggle paper clips. The letter is just some quickly scribbled sentences of outrage and support, written on paper rather than parchment, dated the morning that the article was posted in the Prophet, but Percy has always counted it as the start of his and Oliver’s friendship.

All the other gay and bisexual men who had contacted Percy after the article had seemed – at least to Percy, in his paranoid state – to be edging for a date, or, worse, a one night stand. But not Oliver. He’d just kept sending reassuring owls until he’d somehow become Percy’s best friend. But now, Percy has to consider whether he’d misread his friend through all these years. Percy had kept consorting with Muggles, eventually meeting Audrey, but Oliver had never found a boyfriend that lasted for more than five years or so. Has he secretly been in love with Percy for all these years? No, it was impossible; not even Rita had thought to insinuate it. But if that isn’t it, what is? Had Oliver just been struck by the idea now, as Percy spoke it?

* * *

Percy is awakened from his reveries by Oliver handing him a cup of tea. As Percy wraps his cold hands around the cup his finger brush against Oliver's hand, and he looks up into a shy smile that makes his friend look at least twenty years younger. The smile makes Percy’s heart ache, because he knows he has to make that hopeful little smile go away. This is too new, too much, for him to handle from his morass of grief.

“I’m… I’m not ready for anything _now_ ,” Percy says, voice hitching.

Oliver nods.

“I know, I know,” he says, reassuringly, his smile still there.

He sits down on the sofa beside Percy, and puts his arm around him in a touch that says ‘just friends.’ But the tea has the sweet, fresh taste of a new possibility, and Percy can’t help smiling down into his cup. Maybe he’ll have occasion to buy a dozen red roses once more in his life.

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is the last of my three entries to Rumpelstiltskin's Companion Piece Challenge. The things that connect the three stories are:
> 
> They’re all about a possible beginning of a Percy/Oliver relationship.  
> They’re all Canon compatible, though also all mutually exclusive.  
> They’re all written in third person and present tense.  
> One story is from Percy’s POV, one from ‘Oliver’s’ and one uses both.  
> The phrase ‘a flash of red’ is used to refer to Percy’s hair in all three stories.  
> They’re all belated gifts to Sam for her birthday…
> 
> : )


End file.
